Read Online Starfire by Charles Sheffield - Free Book Online Page B

check that. Think it's important?"
    "I suspect that it is not. Continue."
    "Right. Myra Skelton, Tanya Bishop, Doris Wu, Cissy Muller, April Jarrow." Seth counted them off on his fingers. If he had notes, I did not see him referring to them. "All right, we're up to number six. There was a gap here, an' people must have wondered for a while if the killer was done or died or shipped away from Sky City. Until March second, more than three weeks later, when they found Brenda Cleve with her throat cut."
    "Her age?" I wondered if the eight-year-old had been an anomaly.
    "Thirteen years and three months. No signs of mutilation, but in her case there had been recent sexual intercourse. They found a semen sample, an' over the next few days they did a DNA match for every blessed male on Sky City. They thought for a while they had the killer, a fourteen-year-old by the name of Donovan Summers. But it turned out that he and Brenda had been humpin' for months, and they'd had sex early the evening she died. He'd been home with his family on the other side of Sky City at the time when Brenda was murdered, and he had alibis for most of the others. The reason he didn't come forward as soon as he heard about Brenda was because he didn't want his parents to know he'd been having sex." Seth shook his head. "Boy, can I relate to that. If my old dad had known what I was up to when I was fourteen, he'd have tanned my ass."
    The thought of a fourteen-year-old Seth Parsigian was too incongruous to sanction. And yet such a person had existed, just as there had once been a fourteen-year-old Oliver Guest. Unlike Seth, I had been a paragon of pious virtue, then, and for many years after, my father's greatest source of pride. He never contacted me after my arrest. I suspect that my filial image at that point became somewhat tarnished.
    "Number seven was another disappearance," Seth continued. "An' this was different for a lot of reasons. First off, the girl who was killed wasn't a Sky City kid at all. Her name was Lucille DeNorville, an' she was up from Earth for a sight-seein' vacation. You may have heard about it because the media made a bigger noise over her than all the others put together."
    He glanced at me expectantly, and I shook my head. "I have little time to spare for the worries of others. My own problems are quite sufficient."
    "That right?" Seth's face showed not the slightest hint of interest or sympathy. "Well, Lucille vanished on March tenth, one week shy of her thirteenth birthday. Her granny an' granpappy back on Earth—she was an orphan—made a gigantic fuss about it. The DeNorvilles are loaded, so they could pay whatever it took to explore every last avenue. Not only that, they're from a really old and well-connected family—claim their line goes back over a thousand years—an' they have political and social clout. They had investigators talkin' to every single human on Sky City, an' as many robots and rolfes as could answer. The family offered a big reward, too—still waitin' for a taker—an' they made it pretty clear they didn't care if they saw the murderer dead or alive. So there were bounty hunters all over, clogging up the works. Didn't do a bit of good, because they all come up blank. Never found a body, never had a suspect.
    "But the DeNorville family paid for reconstructions of all the murders, takin' everything anyone knew or could guess about what happened." Seth glanced around the long, stone-walled room, filled with smoky shadows cast by the dying peat fire. "Got a playback unit here, or did you go caveman all the way?"
    Twenty-seven years had done nothing to improve his manners. "Over in the corner," I said, "you will find the best playback equipment in Ireland. I will show you how to use it should your mechanical aptitude match your tact and diplomacy."
    It was wasted on him. He grinned, stood up, and headed for the far corner of the room. It was past midnight and the wall lights were already dimmed.
    "You'll be